What Happened Last Session
The Last Form Falls
The fight in the hidden valley picked up where Session 9 - Hold the Door left it. One shape was still standing, swollen with the pieces it had taken back, and Bray was holding the fleshy door shut. The thing begged. “Stop, stop! I can’t hold myself together much longer… I can feel him kicking.” It swore it had only ever sat on the throne because from there it could see the whole realm and look for its way home.
Ro’an made it one offer: “Spit out Abran, and we’ll let you go back to your home.” It called the offer a trick, and asked Bray to show it the way through. Behind the door, voices asked whether it was wet over here, and begged to drink, just a little. “You drain my world of its resources!” it screamed. When Ro’an asked whether the snow was their stolen water, it answered: “You stole long before the snow.”
Then it put on Abran’s face. “No, please don’t do this!” Only Arthur kept his nerve, and everyone struck at once. The white sword went through it, Brave Sir Robin’s flail came down on the face, and Arthur went low. The body burst apart and the head stayed whole. Abran’s own voice spoke one last time: “Thank you… you’ve done the realm good.” The Free Knight, ruler of Dowell, died inside the thing that had worn him.
A Pyre for the Door
Bray had looked through before he let go: a colourless dark lit red by embers, ash falling, and mummified hands reaching for the light. He snapped off the fingers that came through. When he stepped away, the door began to open. The company piled kindling against it, and Arthur climbed the tree and shot a burning arrow down. The door burned like meat. Through the gap, dried-out figures ran toward the flames, caught, and fell. The door melted away. The screaming didn’t stop, and it may never stop.
It was still snowing.
The Worst Seer
At Hynere Towers, Turnbuck the Forge Knight received them in a gold-leaf hall, promised miners to seal the valley, and said Hynere would honour Abran “in our own way” for the trade he built. His Seer, the Worst Seer, sat alone on a high throne in a lonely tower and found the worst thing to say to every knight. He called Bray “the worst fucking vampire I’ve ever seen”. He looked at Robin and said, “What is your skin?… You’re not fooling anyone!” Then he took a little spirit from each of them and gave the first straight answer of the season: “There’s an ogre over towards the north. He’s brought the snow… if you don’t do this, everyone dies in the realm.”
North they rode, through eyes watching from the veil and a cold that drove them the long way round. At a hot spring at 0202 a crocodile came at Arthur’s Circle, sure they served the ogre. Seeli roped it, Ro’an talked the villagers’ pitchforks down (“Everyone! Shared trauma!”), and Nattlesnap, banished by his old master, offered to lead them to the castle through the catacombs.
The First Skull
Under the mountains at 0301 the dead were small, overworked and newly dead: Hynere’s child miners. They whispered where the ogre’s soul was: in the first skull buried here. Two reluctant knights on patrol, Foxter and Hygo, admitted the ogre held their children, and swore to rise when called. A false floor in the one empty sarcophagus dropped Robin down a long stair into a pharaoh’s tomb, where an ogre-sized corpse lay among the gold. Ro’an pissed on the skull. Then they smashed it together, and Ro’an kept a shard.
No More Quiet
The ogre came for them in his hall, huge, with a bone knife and a horned crown that skewered his own servant. “No! I want it quiet again! Snow keep peasant indoor and house quiet!” He healed as they cut him, though slower than he should have, with the skull gone. He charged into Arthur’s invisible ring head first. His knife opened Bray to the bone. Bray’s bite made him groggy, and Robin went down. Then Arthur put a burning arrow into his eye. He fell, blind and on fire, and Ro’an took his head off at the neck while Bray showed him every terrible thing he had done.
They walked outside, and the snow had stopped.
Looking Ahead
It melted within days. The fruit planted in Dowell fed the realm, the Green’s faithful carried it, and the rotting mushroom at the Cap began to heal. Dowell’s missing families were found in a part of the dungeon built for them, and the Sheriff took the seat, though the table wondered whether anyone but a knight can hold it. Catfold the washer man became the Tankard Knight, and the Red Seer has the knight it asked for. Each knight gained two Glory, and the Season turned.
Some things stayed unsaid: the realm’s name, what is left of the ogre’s captives, and the screaming in a valley east of Hynere. This was the end of Mythic Bastionland.
A face is easy to borrow; it is what you do with the time someone else has paid for that gets remembered.